THE CONTRIBUTION OF PROSODIC BOUNDARY MARKERS TO THE PERCEPTUAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN READ AND SPONTANEOUS SPEECH

Listeners are able to tell apart read-aloud and spontaneously produced speech. Prosody appears to be important for this perceptual distincti on. In this paper, the importance of the distribution and realization of prosodic boundaries is investigated. Recordings were made of five m ale speakers, spontaneously producing so-called instruction monologues . Transcripts of these monologues were read aloud by the same speakers . A perception experiment was carried out to obtain classification sco res for isolated utterances selected from the spontaneous and read mat erial. Auditory prosodic transcriptions were made of the entire sponta neous and read monologues, assessing the distribution and realization of underlying prosodic boundaries in both speech types. The underlying prosodic structure was assessed by means of an automatic text-to-spee ch system. Observed differences in the production of prosodic boundari es in the spontaneous and read material are related to the perceptual classification scores by means of a multiple regression analysis. Resu lts show a significant correlation, suggesting that differences in the distribution and realization of prosodic boundaries contribute signif icantly to the perceptual difference between spontaneous and read spee ch.